Water issues raised in Federal Parliament.
19-October-2010
Mr FORREST (Mallee) (12.53 pm)—Can I commence
my remarks in response to the Governor-
General’s speech by congratulating the members for
Canberra and Herbert for their first contributions. It is
interesting for those of us who have been here a little
longer than they have to think about how we felt when
we first arrived in this place. I remember standing here
on behalf of the nearly 100,000 constituents in my
electorate and feeling great honour in being their voice
in this great chamber. Congratulations to them both. As
the Governor-General made her speech in the other
place, I was thinking about how, even after my seventh
occasion of winning the confidence of the people of the
division of Mallee, that sense of honour and privilege
at the opportunity to speak on behalf of such a large
number of people still remains.
I was impressed that the Governor-General’s first
remarks went towards parliamentary reform. I was
thrilled, Mr Speaker, to hear those words spoken on the
subject of the reform that is needed in this place, and
especially in reference to question time. I congratulate
you, sir, on your first week of question time. I did note
that without being prompted by the member for Mallee
or anybody else you actually drew the attention of
somebody who was not addressing their remarks to the
chair. I know you understand how I feel about that because,
as you would know, it is the only point of order
I have ever raised in this place. And there was a reason
for that point of order: in any proper meeting you
might be at, remarks are addressed through the chair
because it is less confrontational, less provocative and
less rancorous.
I will be looking forward to the new rules being applied
because the hardest thing I have found in all the
time I have been here is trying to justify to the school
groups that I have invited to the gallery the behaviour
that they witness in this place, particularly in regard to
question time. There is no explanation for it. In meeting
them afterwards or a few weeks later in their classroom
they say to me, ‘Mr Forrest, I am not allowed to
behave like that in the classroom.’ Neither should they.
I usually respond to them by saying, ‘When you see me
do it, it is time for you to write me a letter and tell me I
have been here too long.’ So in that first week of question
time when the foreign minister responded to a
question and sat down after four minutes I turned to Mr
Oakeshott, the member for Lyne, and said, ‘Well done!’
I will be gratefully encouraged, Mr Speaker, if you
continue to enforce that because it will be the single
most important measure in making the chamber less
disorderly and will therefore enhance its stature. The
member for Canberra already made reference to the
need for members in this place to be well regarded.
Improvement in behaviour will contribute more than
anything else towards that.
I was particularly overwhelmed on the evening of 21
August to find such a massive endorsement of me in
the division of Mallee. I was greatly humbled. I was
amazed that even more votes could be gleaned in the
strongly conservative electorate that is Mallee, but
people said to me throughout the campaign that they
respected my position because I did not play any of the
silly games. Brinkmanship and partisanship is so much
wasted energy. I might not like the party who has
enough members to make a government. I might not
like their policy approach on a whole range of issues—
and in fact some of those issues are adversely impacting
upon my constituency—but I have to accept the
reality that they are an elected government. Even in
this case where there is such a fragile margin I have to
accept the reality that those ministers of the Crown are
now appointed and that I will need their cooperation in
order to deliver the aspirations I have for my constituency.
The Governor-General also focused very much on
the need for a stronger economy, and she made the
point that this was to be achieved by government actions.
To be frank, that may well be true, and governments
set the overarching fiscal parameters. But the
pleasant reality I notice in my own constituency is that
the greatest contributor to our regional economy will
32 HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES Monday, 18 October 2010
CHAMBER
be the profits generated from rainfall outcomes. To
stand, as I have, in canola crops up to my chin in the
northern Mallee is something I have not seen in the
nearly 18 years I have been the member. What we now
need is arrangements in place whereby the farming
community can take advantage of this—so that they
are not disadvantaged by taxation pressure and so that
whatever dividends return to them after seven or eight
years of very meagre incomes do not adversely impact
their future viability. The determined resilience of the
people in my electorate makes me proud to be in this
place in order to represent them.
The Governor-General then went on to the need for
infrastructure investment, particularly in regard to the
parlous state of the water supply we have seen right
around the nation. The irrigators in my constituency
are currently beside themselves in regard to the implications
of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority’s plan. I
just hope that the water minister, the Minister for Sustainability,
Environment, Water, Population and Communities,
the Hon. Tony Burke, and the Minister for
Regional Australia, Regional Development and Local
Government, the Hon. Simon Crean, will listen to my
remarks here. As the only civil engineer in the whole
place, I have spent most of my time arguing for the
need to invest in the plumbing of Australia’s antiquated
irrigation arrangements. Some of them are as old as
150 years. Most of them were instigated by the governments
of the day after the first big war and the second
big war. They are already obsolete and inefficient.
I championed the cause of one particular water supply
scheme—the need to pipe the Wimmera-Mallee. It
is a huge part of western Victoria, covering one-third of
the state’s supply from storages in the Grampian
Mountains by open channel all the way north to Ouyen
in the northern Mallee. Although an engineering
achievement of its time before the turn of the century—
it took 67 years to build the Wimmera-Mallee,
including all the storages and supply—to now have it
completely piped with a partnership funding arrangement
between the Commonwealth government, state
government and the local community is an achievement
that I am immensely proud of. It serves the purpose
of demonstrating what the nation has to do. To
say we are purchasing water from alleged voluntary
sellers is just a misnomer. The great bulk of my irrigators
have got to the stage where they may be considered
voluntary but it is the only option they have in
order to redeem some of their equity in their lives’ investment.
Often it is a second- or third-generation life
investment. It is not fair to describe them as willing
sellers.
As I have said constantly, fix the plumbing and there
will be real water savings achieved on a massive scale.
For example, the piping of the Wimmera-Mallee, both
in the north and right across the south, all completed
saves enough water every year to fill Olympic swimming
pools placed end to end from Melbourne all the
way to Darwin and back again. It is a huge amount of
water that is saved. There are irrigation systems in
place right through New South Wales and the Victorian
side of the Murray Valley that supply hundreds of
kilometres of earthen channel with massive evaporation,
massive seepage, and creating additional salinisation
to boot that deserve investment. That is a big challenge.
I am just hoping that with the status of the numbers
in the chamber today we will get some real attention
to an engineering fix.
When the Romans built a new city the first thing
they secured was their water supply to give them security
of supply in the event of siege from any of Rome’s
enemies of the day but also to secure the viability of
that city. The first thing they did was to provide an assured
water supply. Their engineering achievements
are still visible today. Huge aqueducts were built by
military engineers in those days. They did not become
civil engineers until the end of the Roman Empire
when instead of working for the military they moved
towards working in the civic areas. They became civil
engineers. Tunnels through the rock to supply water is
a staple of virtually the whole of the Murray-Darling
Basin.
The second thing I would like to say is that my
growers—and some of this is because they have a suspicious
view of the agenda—to some extent resent the
criticism they often hear that they are the problem.
They are not. In the past 20 years irrigators along the
Murray Valley, particularly in regard to horticulture,
have already made a huge sacrificial contribution.
When I was a young graduate the issue was salinity. I
was born and raised in the soldier settlement district of
Red Cliffs where my father and uncles could not spray
their citrus in the daytime. They had to wait until the
evening because of the high salinity of the water being
supplied to them through the river. That is where I have
come from. I have seen immense, positive changes, but
that contribution has come because irrigators have been
prepared to sacrifice some of the surplus water they do
not need and all they are asking for is some consideration.
They also say to me that they are part of the solution
and they are not the issue. I say to the Australian nation
and those ministers who now will be responsible for
making a decision on whether the authority’s plan is
acceptable in its current form that new cities and provincial
communities were created because of government
investment. Swan Hill and Tresco were First
World War soldier settlement districts. Robinvale was a
First World War and Second World War soldier settlement
district. Red Cliffs, the hometown of my youth,
was too. They were all created by government investment.
Governments have a responsibility to ensure that
Monday, 18 October 2010 HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 33
CHAMBER
the prosperity that has been created continues so that
we have inland provincial centres of great economic
strength.
I will say how disappointed I was when I read a
copy of the authority’s report to find the economic impacts
of their proposals completely underdone. I do not
accept their defence that their focus was on the environment
because that was the way the legislation directed
them. I expect an independent authority to do its
homework, and to say that the removal of 3,000 gigalitres
of water from the Murray-Darling Basin would
result in only 800 jobs lost is completely unacceptable.
A rough guide would be that every gigalitre of water
lost to irrigation represents approximately 30 jobs
spread across the whole local economy. Therefore the
figure for that level of water is more like 80,000 jobs,
not 800. I will be looking forward to seeing the authority
do its homework better. In fact, I am pleased to see
that the government has accepted this point. I heard the
honourable minister for regional Australia on my local
radio last week. To paraphrase, he said he had got the
message on that matter.
One thing that irrigators in my electorate resent is
the assumption that they do not care about the environment
of the Murray River. That is completely unfair.
Many of us live on it. In fact, I live on the river,
and when I have visitors from Melbourne or other
places around Australia they look out at the river and
say, ‘We thought it was dry.’ It is the most carefully
and judiciously managed river in the whole world, and
people travel internationally to find out how we
achieve such good management of the Murray-Darling
river system. It once boasted the most secure water
supply system in the world, and the events of the last
five or six years have proved just how callous and misguided
that assumption is.
Another thing irrigators in my electorate say to me
is that they resent governments—any government of
any colour—purchasing water in what is supposed to
be a commercial water market. I am not on any particular
government’s case here, because the government
that I was part of engaged in this activity. It is a complete
distortion of the market when governments move
in to buy water in that way with the huge cheque-book
that they have. It distorts the market, and it is not fair.
It is done by both sides of politics, and I am alarmed at
the current circumstances out on the southern end of
the Mallee division around the Horsham district with
the piping of the Wimmera-Mallee supply system and
the lack of water people there have had in the last
seven or eight years. The Wimmera irrigation district
has not had any water at all, and there are about 30,000
megalitres of water available, but either the irrigators
in those areas who have that allocation have to sell it
on for the benefit of the environment or we need another
$30 million or $40 million to rehabilitate the irrigation
district.
Those irrigators who are associated with the Horsham
irrigation district have come to the point where
they decided that perhaps their best option is to redeem
this asset and put the capital to better use. So they offered
it to the federal government. They started at
$1,800 per megalitre and they were refused; the department
said that this was not considered value for
money. So they rejigged their offer and progressively
came down. The last offer was $1,100, and they are
now considering coming down to $900 per megalitre.
This is completely unfair. There is no buyer except the
federal government. It is not a market at all. A sum of
$950 million went into the piping of the Wimmera-
Mallee to save the amount of water that has been
saved. It was an investment that two governments—the
state and the federal governments—and a community
were prepared to make and they put the value of that
water at $7,000 to $8,000 per megalitre. That is what a
community, including the federal government in Canberra,
local governments and local water authorities
considered was the value of having environmental water
for the Wimmera River, the Glenelg River and those
very dry terminal lakes all the way up to Lake Hindmarsh
and Albacutya, yet here is a government saying
that compensation of $1,100 per megalitre to irrigators
does not represent value for money. I find that argument
completely obtuse.
I am pleased to see that the authority has scheduled
one of its consultation meetings in Horsham on, I
think, 11 November. I will be pleased to see that issue
brought to the authority’s attention by the large number
of irrigators associated with that supply system. There
is a lot of work to be done, and I am saying to the Hon.
Simon Crean and the Hon. Tony Burke: for goodness
sake listen to the engineers, because there are viable
and realistic and economic engineering solutions to the
challenges of the Murray-Darling Basin, even to the
extent of flooding wetlands. This can be done in an
engineering way, and to some extent that has been experimented
with in the last three or four years in the
Hattah Lakes by pumping the lower level of the river
water and supplying the lakes that way. But that would
not be a substitute for the big flood, which we may or
may not get, that is needed once in a hundred years so
that the wetlands get the drink they so desperately
need. So there are engineering solutions. I was pleased
to see that the Governor-General’s speech highlighted
that as a major area of government activity. I will be
looking forward to having some say in that, and I argue
that irrigators are not, as alleged, the problem but very
much an important part of the solution.
I finish my remarks by going back to where I
started—that is, the behaviour of this chamber. I hope
that this week and next week we see much the same
34 HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES Monday, 18 October 2010
CHAMBER
behaviour as we saw in our first week after the swearing-
in, because we are on display. Even as I speak,
there are schoolchildren in the gallery, and we need to
consider what they will think of adults if this place
erupts and they see adults behaving in the same way
that I have seen members behave all throughout the
time that I have been here. I will be looking forward to
that reform being implemented, and I place that responsibility
in your hands, Mr Deputy Speaker.